Outsmarting Network Security with SDN Teleportation

TL;DR

This paper reveals a new vulnerability in SDN called teleportation, where attackers can bypass network security controls by exploiting the control plane, posing significant security risks and prompting countermeasure discussions.

Contribution

The paper characterizes the teleportation attack design space, identifies four techniques, and demonstrates their potential for security breaches in SDN environments.

Findings

Four teleportation techniques identified and characterized

Teleportation can be used for high-rate data exfiltration

Discussion of potential countermeasures initiated

Abstract

Software-defined networking is considered a promising new paradigm, enabling more reliable and formally verifiable communication networks. However, this paper shows that the separation of the control plane from the data plane, which lies at the heart of Software-Defined Networks (SDNs), introduces a new vulnerability which we call \emph{teleportation}. An attacker (e.g., a malicious switch in the data plane or a host connected to the network) can use teleportation to transmit information via the control plane and bypass critical network functions in the data plane (e.g., a firewall), and to violate security policies as well as logical and even physical separations. This paper characterizes the design space for teleportation attacks theoretically, and then identifies four different teleportation techniques. We demonstrate and discuss how these techniques can be exploited for different attacks (e.g., exfiltrating confidential data at high rates), and also initiate the discussion of possible countermeasures. Generally, and given today's trend toward more intent-based networking, we believe that our findings are relevant beyond the use cases considered in this paper.